Blogathon 24/21: Grass, man

After a winter of dogs hurtling back and forth over it, one of the dogs digging little bits up and bringing said bits into the house, extremes of very heavy rain and weeks of snow, our rear lawn is looking very poorly indeed. There’s more mud than grass out there right now, and it isn’t going to get any better on its own. ‘Threadbare’ doesn’t even come close to describing it.

I had the notion of reseeding the lawn through the simple expedient of sprinkling (in a controlled fashion) grass seed the length and breadth of the garden, and letting the new seed take root and grow amongst the existing grass remnants. This, I determined, is Brilliant Idea (v1.0) because, well, it just is.

Except that googling ‘Is grass seed bad for dogs’ tells me that this is actually Not Such A Brilliant Idea After All; grass seed being actually very bad for dogs, if they ingest any. And let’s face it, with two spanners zooming all over the garden at terrific speed, chasing each other, the cats, the birds, any other real or imaginary creatures they see/don’t see, the chances of grass seed ingestion could only be described as ‘incredibly high’. Well, that idea is a non-starter then. *puts that idea in the bin*

My next Brilliant Idea (v2.0) is to lay turf. Simple, almost immediate results, a weekend to do the job from start to finish. What’s not to like? Well… Apparently you have to stay off newly-laid turf for up to six weeks. It has to ‘root in’, you see? Which is great, obviously, because you’d want your newly turfed lawn to be ‘rooted in’, except… the dogs. I don’t think any amount of negotiation is going to prevent a pair of energetic spanners from hoolying across the newly-laid turf. No, quite.

Then I had Brilliant Idea (v2.1) which is to lay turf, but do only do half the lawn, and then do the other half in six weeks when the first half is ‘rooted in’. Well, that’s certainly a cunning notion, but can it be brought forward as a Cunning Plan? We would have to literally wall off the turfed half, or put up electrified tape, just like I used to use with the horses, when I needed to keep them apart from each other, or away from something. And that would be an interesting challenge.

Brilliant Idea (v3.0) is to get the whole lawn turfed and to keep the dogs off it 24/7 for six weeks and yeah, that’s really not going to work.

I suppose there is a Brilliant Idea (v4.0) which is to get the whole lot taken up and get some of that very expensive AstroTurf laid down. Not the cheap stuff that looks like plastic, but the really soft, silky smooth, grass-like stuff. But I do wonder how long it would take a pair of spanners to completely trash AstroTurf (not very long, possibly).

Oh well.

I’ll accept all/any suggestions. Anyone?